Friday, July 26, 2013

Men who hate female gamertags

Hey you, you psychophysicalsocial being! Go back to being a psychological, or physical, or social being, and do something very stereotypical from my point of a view. You cannot play on our field.

The third wave of feminism (or equalism, as some may prefer) is a mixture of modern sociology build on the political ideas of the previous generations. You might say that it goes beyond of genders, to it's core self of words in semiotical sense. See, we are not males and females, we are constructs of our minds. To make it simple, think of the movie Matrix. There is a scene where people eating, and whose whole lives have been unreal in a sense, that robots have messed with people's brains to make them observe reality as them robots want them to, start a discussion about senses, or more like, how be observe reality. These people have lived in this place called the Matrix, where every possible thing that you can imagine, is projected in your mind, and one day some of them see the light, allegorically, and start to fight against these machines. If you are not familiar with the movie Matrix, I hope you have had at least the opportunity to come across the Plato's cave allegory.

Back to the scene: people, outside of this imaginative Matrix, are feasting in this post-apocalyptic world, and eating some kind of a porridge. One of the freed souls starts to think that, as they were in the Matrix, what if the computer, which inputs all sensory data straight into people's brains, got mixed up with how things really taste. He throws out this idea of what if chicken actually tastes like that nutrious-but-undelicious porridge that they are eating, and the taste of chicken (in the Matrix) is actually from a totally different food. He even goes farther by thinking, what if the computer doesn't know what chicken tastes like at all, and that is the reason why everything tastes like chicken.

The allegory here is that every part of our used language and customs are based on transferred beliefs, and our job as thinking individuals is hard as hell. We actually have to figure out what those abstracts mean, and I must say that I'm still working on the Wittgenstein level. Wittgenstein paradoxically thought that language is so inaccurate that we shouldn't use it at all, and he went very deed explaining it to us mortals - using language. How it affects my thinking, and what's my point? Well, gender is also a product of our language, and while we can see that gender is also a physical, and a social construct, it's also a psychological construct of how we perceive it in ourselves and others.

This is the surface of my thoughts when I found this cool blog post titled "Game on ladies" on Fly Girl Gamers. It wasn't the actual post which troubled me the most. It was the commentaries - again. There must be some kinds of rules of physics that get commentaries sidetracked. I even think that there is a pseudo Hitler-card somewhere along the comment posts. Not sure.

Original post is about a guy, who finds out about how much trash young men throw against women. It's a very short, eye-opening story about a man, who logs to Xbox Live (assumption) with his wife's gamertag (that's kind of a cheating, but I'll let it slide) to play Mass Effect 3 multiplayer. Two of the other players out of four instantly start bringing this gamer down as they think that the actual player is a woman. Let me bring out that this is a co-op, a game mode where people have to work together to achieve goals. The husband stays silent, but is furious, and starts playing more seriously than ever. After the first round, he is away ahead of the two other in scores. These two, may I remind you that this is co-op, take sides to beat "her" score - failing. After the actual session, the fourth one, who hasn't spoken a word during the session and scored second best, came alive stating: "Damn, she and I had the top two ranks and you guys spent most of the match dead on your backs... You let two girls dominate you. Daaang." She was a woman, but just not speaking, cause...would you?

I think justice got served on some level, but what if the player, and the "other" girl, would have not been so great at the game? Then it would have just proven the point of - now I have to be careful - women can (also) suck at games.

I would recommend reading the comment posts, all of them, even after the hilarious KOZ ends up his ranting about the inferior women players.

Now on xbox: Assassin's creed 2 - brotherhood, Final Fantasy XIIIReading: Fables part 6, The fecking book of Irish history for anyone who hasn't been paying attention for the last 30,000 years, The girl with a dragon tattoo (originally: Men, who hate women)Catching up on television: Dexter, True Blood, Quantum Leap (5th season), How I met your mother (2nd season), Falling skies (1st season)